Caitlin Fisher has a blog, uses Google, and hates her parents. She also hates this book, but not nearly as much as she should.
That's all I got, except to say that Ryan Holiday's recommendation of this book is enough for me to ignore him now forever, which is liberating AF.
- I’m a published author — a fact I manage to forget on a regular basis.
Uhm. Is it because nobody buys her book(s)? Idk I have a friend who is published author with like 100 sold copies and he for certain remembers he's a published author?
- I started my writing journey as a minimalism blogger. I used to write about how I only owned five pairs of shoes, and how I maintained my 500 square foot apartment and didn’t own a TV, and how I aspired to fit everything I owned into my Honda Fit.
Oh look at that almost snuck in brag about not owning a TV!
- I have more stuff now — and a larger car. I no longer write about minimalism.
The dream is dead!
- The millennial generation is highly educated and makes up the largest portion of the global workforce. And yet we’re still picking up gig work and second jobs to make ends meet because the status quo didn’t get the memo that we’re building a better world.
How is she building a better world?
- I’m not sure if you know this, but society is meant to change and adapt. The fact that the United States minimum wage has stagnated at $7.25 since 2009 while the cost of living soars is not an accident. It’s by design.
And the fact that we were raised to believe we would inherit a better world than our parents were raised in, only to have the rug pulled out from under us and told that’s not how it works, is nothing short of gaslighting.
OMG
Allow me to regurgitate a review on Goodreads by Danielle that summarizes what I took away from that blog post. I cannot imagine sitting through that book...
- Read like an idiot’s tumblr post circa 2010. A fee of the right questions asked, very few “right” or even thoughtful, let alone researched, conclusions. I’m shocked this was published.
Also this:
I mean, this
Was worth reading. It wasn't worth recommending? Bruce Gibney also hates his parents but at least he does some research, asks around, formulates hypotheses and defends them, etc. Caitlin Fisher decided she wasn't expert enough to write a chapter on religion so she asked one of her friends, an ex-baptist who is still very very angry at her religion, to write a few paragraphs about how much religion sucks. Thing of it is, her level of understanding about everything else is as poor as her understanding of religion yet she felt no need to investigate it further than a cursory Google search.
It's an... incurious book. A long-form tumblr smackdown. There were no references she used that I was unfamiliar with and the majority of them I've read (haven't read any Dave Ramsay). But... most of them were Atlantic articles? Cherry-picked for whatever statistic she needed in the moment? To provide a structure for "here is why I personally am angry about something I read online and here personally are why you should personally leave me alone."
On the plus side it's a 5-hour audiobook and since I do audiobooks at 1.5-1.75x it was begun and done in the time it took me to trim the rhododendrons, rake up leaves and hang up christmas lights.
- How is she building a better world?
by paying them $3k to workshop your book
I would quote some text but it's center-justified and I don't want to catch a disease LOL